It’s not just any study, mind you. Smith’s critique refers to the study published in 2000 that compared 8000 patients who had received either the now controversial pain medication Vioxx or a more standard drug. He stresses that although errors in the data came to light, and appeared on the US Food and Drug Administration’s website in 2001, NEJM did not publish a formal correction to the study until December 2005. That’s an unacceptable delay, says Smith.

The data submitted to the FDA website by Merck, which developed Vioxx, revealed that a higher percentage of people suffered heart problems than previously reported.

In Smith's editorial, which appears in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, he says that before Merck pulled Vioxx from the market, it had purchased 900,000 reprints of the 2000 study from the NEJM (at an estimated cost of $700,000 - $830,000) to use in promoting its drug.

Smith does not mince words. He speculates that the NEJM makes a profit of about $15 million under the Massachusetts Medical Society, the owner of the journal. “The society has grown fat on the profits and is keen not only to keep the profits coming but also to exploit the brand,” he says by way of explanation.

Though Smith does not pose the question directly, the content of his article does prime readers to wonder whether the NEJM resisted publishing the correction earlier so it could earn money from the reprints. But I feel that that sort of cynical implication goes too far. I did contact representatives of the NEJM, but they were not immediately able to respond.

While I believe Smith's call for timely publication of corrections carries serious weight, I think it’s important not to get too stuck on his journal-as-cash-cow hypothesis. Best practice is best practice, no matter how much money you make.

I would not rush to underestimate the financial motives of journals. Even so-called "respectable" journals like the NEJM are lucrative businesses. Many scientific journals charge authors fees for publishing, in addition to exhorbitant subscription fees charged to libraries. The National Institutes of Health has launched a drive to make scientific publication more accessible, free, and disseminated more rapidly. These improvements are certainly possible from a technical standpoint with the internet. And the argument is logical that government-sponsored research should be made available to the public, in a truly public, free-access venue, since it has already been paid for by tax dollars. The staggering cost of some journals to libraries is simply unnecessary from a technical point of view. To assume that they give value for money is also flawed.

The peer-review process which some journals tout is somewhat overblown. In recent decades the proportion of papers published by single-authors has diminished to almost nil. Despite lip service by journals on copyright and release forms, the practice still continues where co-authors are named simply for collegial or political purposes, or because they provided data. I personally know of instances where co-authors did not even read the manuscript. This is especially prominent with MD authors from what I have seen.

The recent MMR vaccine paper, for which author endorsement was withdrawn by many of the co-authors after a scandal and public expense to re-examine the science, is another example of false vetting by a journal of an author's inappropriate financial interests which may be served by a spin on research findings. Not to mention the epidemic of measles to which it contributed. This is but one example of papers in prestigious journals which are sometimes statistically flawed, show bad science, or most commonly, are so badly written that their scientific merit cannot really be assessed.

The prestige of journals is all "brand management" and the peer-review process of science can basically be done without them.

I agree with Cohen that being on a pharmaceutical company's speakers bureau is unlikely to bias a study. However I wouldn't put it out of the ambit of a journal to withhold new findings in order to make money, as most established journals are hugely profitable business enterprises. The contrived notion of "ethics" has descended upon scientific research in the last decade or so, making it difficult or impossible for some research to take place (as if scientists have no ethics of their own). But the financial strategies and politics of journals seems to have been ignored when it comes to the ethics of science. Where are the ethicists when you need them? Journals too should come under more scrutiny for what and how they promulgate research findings.

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